IBM introduced the very first floppy disk in 1971. This “memory disk” as it was called at that time, was an 8” plastic disk coated with magnetic iron oxide; Data was written to read from the disk’s surface. The 8” plastic floppy disk was considered to be revolutionary during its time because not only was it considere

The floppy disk was invented by IBM engineers led by none other than Alan Shugart. The first floppy disks his team created were just designed for loading micro codes into the controller of the IBM 3330 disk pack file. However, additional uses for the floppy disk quickly occurred. Some examples of these other uses were transferring documents from one computer to another, and creating copies of very important computer documents. There was one small problem with the 8” disks though. They didn’t have a very large memory capacity. The maximum amount of information one of these disks could hold was 200K of data, which when you think about it, isn’t very much at all. Some e-mail letters are even larger!

Have you ever wondered how a floppy disk worked and what components made it up? Floppy disks of today seem to be constructed a little differently than the ones of the early 1970’s. Today, floppies are just a round, flat piece of Mylar coated with ferric oxide, a rust like substance containing several tiny particles which are capable of holding a magnetic field, and encased in a protective plastic cover, which is commonly known as the disk jacket. Data is stored on the floppy disk by the disk drives read/write head, which alters the magnetic orientation of the particles. It is as simple as that! So, as you can see, the floppy disk is actually a very simple device to create. Even a child is capable of creating one!

The floppy disk has been with us now for nearly 30 years and still continues to run strong. It has gone from being an 8” plastic disk that can only hold a maximum of 200K to a 3 ½” disk that can hold a maximum of 2 megabytes. The floppy disk has adapted to meet the standards of today’s society.

It is now the year 2001 and the floppy disk may now be somewhat obsolete. With the release of the recordable disk, the demand for floppies has gone down. This is because with the recordable disks you can have up to 700 megabytes of space! This is a very large amount when compared to the floppy disk’s absolute ma

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